Maintained by Robin Tecon, microbiologist and postdoctoral researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich. This blog is about bacteria (and other microbes) and the scientists who study them.

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Sunday, January 26, 2014

Is it even necessary
to introduce TED talks?... I guess
everyone has seen at least one of these 18-minute-ish presentations on topics
that deal with (broadly speaking) Technology, Entertainment or Design. These “ideas
worth spreading” (as they are advertised), are presented during the TED Conference,
an event occurring every year on the US West Coast since 1990. It is thanks to
the development of the internet and video streaming, however, that TED talks have
accessed global fame. The first talks were uploaded in 2006, and in 2012 the
total views passed 1-billion! (According to TED.com, there are now more than
1,600 talks available!) With as famous speakers as Al Gore, Bill Gates or Bono,
TED talks have become an unprecedented cultural phenomenon.

Today TED
conferences are organized not only in the US, but also in Canada, in South
America, in Europe and in Asia. More than this, TED has become a label, since
all over the world are organized so-called TEDx events, conferences that share
the TED format but are organized by independent local committees.

Given the
format and the varied audience, TED talks are not meant to treat a topic
exhaustively and should be accessible to the layman. This is not necessarily an
easy job for scientists, still you can find almost four hundreds science talks
on the TED website! It seems thus that science fares pretty well in the TED
universe…

Sunday, January 05, 2014

A few
months ago, the magazine Science
published a special issue on ‘communication in science’. Indeed, the way
scientists exchange information has evolved considerably in the past decade,
thanks notably to the internet and the rise of the open access movement.
Conversely, older means of communication still fare pretty well; despite
predictions of extinction, IRL meetings are still flourishing, and so are
printed books…This year, I want thus
to orientate this blog a little more towards questions related to science
communication (internal and external) and how scientists deal with it. So I plan to write several posts
about the way scientists communicate between themselves and with society. Here
I want to start with how scientists communicate to the general public.

Science for the masses

Scientists
today are constantly reminded of their duty to communicate their research to
the public, and are encouraged to do what is called science outreach. I believe this to be fundamentally a good and a
fair thing, if only because the vast majority of science funding is provided by
the public society via taxes. In addition, and in my view more importantly,
every citizen (as well as society as a whole) gain at a better understanding of
science, this for pragmatic, aesthetic and philosophical reasons.